Why I Hate AsianWeek

A free weekly rag out of San Francisco's Chinatown that bills itself as "The Voice of Asian America" caused an uproar this week with a racist piece of juvenalia by a mentally unstable young writer named Kenneth Eng. The title, "I Hate Blacks" couldn't be any plainer. Nor could its first sentence: "Here is a list of reasons why we should discriminate against blacks, starting from the most obvious down to the least obvious:"



The newspaper is owned and published by the Fang Family, who have been corrupt powerbrokers in San Francisco since the Chiang Kai-Shek days. The patriarch, John Fang, died in 1992 but his widow Florence continues the dynasty along with her sons James and Ted, who are the President and the Editor-At-Large of the paper respectively.



This is the same Fang Family that made the sleazy deal with the Hearst Corporation to take over the Examiner if they were paid $66 million to keep up the fiction that there were two daily newspapers in town rather than a monopoly with the Hearst Chronicle. The Hearst Corporation had been threatened by then-mayor Willie Brown, Jr. and City Attorney Louise Renne with antitrust troubles with the Clinton Administration if they didn't play the game their way.



Still, even with this background, it seems more than a bit insane to run a column entitled "Why I Hate Blacks" next to a full-page ad for Wells Fargo, which is on a very public "diversity" crusade these days. This isn't the demented writer's fault, it's the fault of the editor, whose name is Samson Wong.



"Why I Hate Blacks" isn't the only offensive bit in the same issue. There is also a cartoon on the front "Opinion" page that makes fun of Rosie O'Donnell being a Pig, whether because she's a lesbian, a leftist, or fat is not made particularly clear.



Other than the Macy's ad and the Wells Fargo ad, there didn't seem to be much advertising other than a huge "Legal Notices" section, which I believe is through a contract with the City of San Francisco. At yesterday's Board of Supervisors meeting, Aaron Peskin brought up the newspaper for condemnation and directed all city departments to terminate any business they might have with the rag immediately.



Most of the Asian community in San Francisco is embarrassed and horrified by the turn of events. At SFist, Rita Hao starts a story about it with the two sentences: "Oh dear. Oh dear oh dear oh dear." (Click here for the whole article.)



Linda, the owner of one of the greatest restaurants in the world, the Hunan on Sacramento between Montgomery and Kearny, repeated Rita's words almost exactly when I showed her the article. "This is really, really bad," she said. "Oh dear."

Telegraph Hill Landslide

A chunk of Telegraph Hill tumbled down onto Broadway and Montgomery Streets at 3:15 AM on Monday night after a good, but not particularly unusual, rainfall.



The Red Cross had jumped into action...



...and a large police camp had set up on Broadway...



...across the street from the Showgirls strip club which had a boulder crash into its backside from the cliff underneath the expensive new condo project.



All the apartment buildings on the west side of Montgomery Street between Broadway and Vallejo had been red-tagged...



...and their many occupants evacuated for at least 24 hours.



At Montgomery and Vallejo, one of Telegraph Hill's many garden staircases extends for half a block.



The views are what keep people paying large sums to live on precarious California hillsides and frankly they're worth it.



455 Vallejo is the large, controversial condo complex that went up sometime between five and ten years ago.



That's the Transamerica Pyramid sticking out from its rooftop.



The building had been red-tagged for 24 hours...



...and there were a pair of pleasant cops at the door telling people they needed to get out emergency supplies...



...and then go elsewhere...



...taking away their poor dogs who didn't look too happy about being evacuated.

A New Music Seance 2

The Other Minds Music Festival's fundraiser, A New Music Seance, took place on Saturday at the Swedenborgian Church in Pacific/Presidio Heights.



San Francisco is filled with tucked away, beautiful little churches from the 19th century that feel like anachronisms, and I wonder how they survive other than renting themselves out for weddings and funerals.



Swedenborg was a brilliant, interesting character, though I'm still unclear why a church formed around him posthumously. According to the church's website (click here):

"The spiritual foundations of the worship practiced within this structure are found in the theological writings of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772). Foremost among his ideas is a central perception that all life is spiritual and all things reveal something essential of the divine. Swedenborg believed the world had entered a new phase of spiritual potential during his own lifetime and that he had been called to the role of revelator."

What's most fascinating are the list of his admirers over the centuries. The website continues:

"As a celebrated scientist-turned-mystic whose extensive writings articulated a new understanding of Christianity, Swedenborg's ideas were championed by American Transcendentalist thinkers (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry James Sr., Bronson Alcott) and English Romanticists (William Blake, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Thomas Carlyle). In this century, Helen Keller, D.T. Suzuki, Jorge Luis Borges and William Butler Yeats are among dozens of significant minds who have drawn explicitly upon Swedenborg's religious insights."

The transcendental vision on Saturday belonged to Charles Amirkhanian who has devoted his life to presenting modern music that's slightly off the beaten track, whether on his decades-long KPFA radio show (which is now hosted by Richard Friedman on KALW) or through his Other Minds Music organization (click here for website) which records and preserves music, and holds an annual festival for composers from around the world.



Saturday's fare consisted of three separate concerts, starting at 2PM with Dane Rudhyar's Opus 1 from 1914, the Prayer, Lament and Death March for piano, and almost ending near 11PM with the world premiere of a "Tombeau for Violin and Piano" written by Ronald Bruce Smith.



About half of the pieces were performed by the incomparable Sarah Cahill, whose pre-Raphaelite beauty, musical brilliance, and magical aura never fail to astonish me. (Click here for her website and performing itinerary.)



The fact that she is a fan of this blog is also incalculably pleasing.



There was also a wonderful violinist, Kate Stenberg, who played a world premiere called "Rippling the Lamp" by Amirkhanian himself that thankfully was an absolutely beautiful piece of music, along with duets for piano-and-violin with the pianist Eva-Maria Zimmermann in music by Hovhaness, Josef Matthias Hauer, Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen, and Webern.



Zimmermann also had a chance to shine this year in solo piano pieces by Wladimir Vogel, George Antheil, and William Albright. Her ferocious playing of Antheil's Sonata No. 2 for violin, piano and drums was fun and exciting.



The three concerts were divided evenly between pieces by living and deceased composers, and a number of the former were on hand to hear their own works being played.



The composers and performers stood for a photo-op between concerts in the Swedenborgian Church garden (left to right: Eva-Maria Zimmermann, Ronald Bruce Smith, Phil Collins, Dan Becker, Sarah Cahill, Carl Stone, Kate Stenberg, and Charles Amirkhanian).



The "New Music" world is fairly small and it seems to function much like a loving family (with all the politics, good and bad, that implies) with not much money.



Victoria Shoemaker, for instance, who is the wife of the President of the Other Minds organization, cooked all day in the church kitchen...



...provisioning the performers, composers and stage crew with food and drink...



...culminating in a beautiful Mexican dinner...



...for a large group that even included the widow of Conlon Nancarrow, the recently deceased giant of 20th century music who specialized in fiendishly complex pieces for player piano, four of which were performed during the concerts.



The many highlights of the concert for me included Dane Rudhyar's "Prayer," Wladimir Vogel's "Nature Vivante," Hans Otte's "Das Buch der Klange #10," Frank Martin's "Preludes #7 and #8," Dan Becker's "Don't Make Me Go Back to LA," Ernst Bacon's "The Pig Town Fling," William Albright's "The Sleepwalker's Shuffle," Percy Grainger's "The Immovable Do," and Howard Skempton's "Well, Well, Cornelius."



The wild and funny Antheil Sonata #2 featuring Amirkhanian himself as the drum soloist was the perfect ending to a very long and satisfying day.

Rainbow Porn Humanities

The Civic Center was full of rainbows on Thursday, including a major arc over the Asian Art Museum.



Perhaps they were a herald of the goings-on at the Veterans Building to the right...



...where signage sprouted on Friday for a 40th anniversary for the gay porn company, Colt Studios (click here for their website).



According to a well-written article by Wyatt Buchanan in the San Francisco Chronicle, of all places: "In 2003, former Falcon director John Rutherford and his partner Tom Settle bought Colt, which had been struggling, and moved it to San Francisco, where it once again became successful." (Click here for the full article.)



The anniversary party was being held in the second-floor Green Room of the Veterans Building...



...and if the flower arrangements were any indication, no expense was being spared.



Plus, you could be a Colt Model yourself, at least in your own mind.



The best part of the "Chronicle" article was a quote at the end from John Karr, who writes a brilliant column about porn every week for the local gay rag, the Bay Area Reporter.

Karr said he wonders about the impact of porn on the sex lives of average gay men, whether it leads them into excessive fringe and fetish practices. "The very profusion of the gay sex film industry has led to super-performers being developed that do not represent the everyday person and the everyday person thinks that's how he should be acting -- and the circle continues," Karr said, adding, "This is something to view in wonderment, instead of condemnation."

Meanwhile, downstairs, a two-day series of educational lectures on "The Crusades" was being held at the Herbst Theatre by an organization called Humanities West (click here for their website). Now that's the gay porn movie I want to see, with Christians and Muslims and Jews throwing out their blood hatreds in favor of simple love and lust.

Go Say Hell

Across from San Francisco's Federal Building on Larkin Street at the corner of Turk...



...Kahn & Keville has an auto shop with a large marquee where they often post jokes, alignment specials, and so on.



On Thursday, there was a lovely message thanking the Quakers ("Friends") for their five-year-long peace vigil a block away.



Because of a few hooks holding up the sign, the final line almost reads as "GO SAY HELL" which would work just fine too, considering the atrocities the United States has been perpetrating in the Middle East for the last five years.



The moveon.org people had planned a concurrent lobbying trip on Thursday to Speaker Pelosi's 14th-floor office, but they canceled the action after hearing that Nancy's brother in Baltimore had just died.



Though readers of this blog know that I'm not a big Pelosi fan, at least she's making attempts to get the United States troops out of Iraq, unlike her counterpart Senator Dianne Feinstein whose scumbag husband Richard Blum has been war-profiteering off the Mideast wars through his Perini construction company and URS corporation.



For more info on the latter, read the fine articles by writers Peter Byrne (click here) and Joshua Frank (click here).

Dvorak and Schuman with One N

On Ash Wednesday evening, the San Francisco Symphony offered a hastily put-together program after the scheduled conductor, Carlos Kalmar, canceled with illness and was replaced at the last minute by Alasdair Neale, who used to be the Symphony's Associate Conductor for 12 years.



The original program promised an orchestrated Hungarian Rhapsody by Lizst, a "Fantasy for Cello and Orchestra" called "A Song of Orpheus" by the 20th century American composer William Schuman, and Dvorak's rarely heard Symphony #6. The substitutions were Dvorak's "Carnival Overture" for the Lizst, and Dvorak's widely played Seventh Symphony rather than the Sixth.



The "Carnival Overture" is bombastic Top 10 classical music that you have heard a million times whether you know it or not, and the performance was wonderfully rousing and fun, just as it was written to be.



Unfortunately, the 1961 "A Song of Orpheus" was some of the most boring-ass music I've heard at the symphony in some time, dry and conservative and rhythmically uninteresting. Rick from Napa (above) even fell asleep during the 30-minute piece and threatened to start snoring at any moment, which must have been disconcerting for the soloist, since we were in the first row.



William Schuman was a New York pop songwriter in the 1920s who famously went to a Toscanini concert in 1930, where they were serendipitously playing Wagner and Schumann (with two n's), and the one "n" Schuman decided on the spot to become a classical composer, studying with Roy Harris for a number of years.



He seemed to have played the politics of the New York classical music world with immense skill, winning the first Pulitzer Prize for music; becoming the Director of Publications for G. Schirmer, Inc.; followed by the presidency of the Julliard School of Music for 17 years; and capped by being the first president of Lincoln Center. He also wrote ten symphonies along the way, which I am sure were dutifully played by everyone. In Michael Steinberg's program notes, he writes: "this composition shows us another and particularly likable side of William Schuman." If this is the likable side, please spare me the other.



The only reason to play the piece is if one is featuring an insanely virtuosic cellist, but the soloist for these concerts is Michael Grebanier, the Principal Cellist of the San Francisco Symphony. He's a good musician but a truly mediocre soloist. The practice of having various instrumentalists within the orchestra play a soloist role on occasion has yielded some wonderful moments over the years, but I don't remember Grebanier having supplied any of them.



After intermission, we were treated to the "tragic" and "intensely patriotic" Symphony Number Seven of Dvorak.



Though I love most of Dvorak, especially his opera "Rusalka" and all of his chamber music, the symphonies have always struck me as sounding like second-rate Brahms. Still, after the Schuman "fantasy," second-rate Brahms sounded perfectly masterful.



Plus, the orchestra played with obvious enjoyment for their old friend Alasdair Neale, and in the case of the musician pictured above, with an authentic fervor that was a treat to watch.

Bears, Boars and Buddhas

In honor of the 13th Annual International Bear Rendezvous in San Francisco, we went to the afternoon beer bust at the Lone Star saloon on Saturday.



The "Bear" movement is a reaction to the thin, manicured gay boy look that has been the predominantly marketed flavor for decades, though the movement's insistence on men having to be large and hairy to be considered attractive is equally as absurd. Still, as a marketing device, it certainly seems to be lucrative.



The nonprofit beneficiary of the beer bust was the gay Alexander Hamilton American Legion Post...



...one of whose leaders is John Caldera.



He seems to be everywhere you turn these days. The evening previously Mr. Caldera was playing wine hostess at Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi's art opening which is covered in the post below.



This year, the International Bear Rendezvous folks had moved their headquarters from the Market Street Ramada to the Van Ness and California Holiday Inn, and I'm sorry not to have walked by. Watching Japanese tourists negotiating a lobby filled with legions of 300-pound bearded men with nametags kissing each other is a sight that really shouldn't be missed.



However, The Bears must have had planned activities at the Holiday Inn because the assembled beer drinkers at the Lone Star were the same old shamans who usually show up on Saturday afternoons, minus one of our beloved buddies, Jess Johnston (above) who died suddenly of pneumonia last month.



The gay state assemblyman, Mark Leno, had obviously been misinformed about the nature of the crowd, because he welcomed everyone to San Francisco even though the vast majority were locals.



Leno also probably shouldn't have arrived quite so late into the beer bust because the crowd was well-lubricated and in a mood to heckle the politician.



The next day I went to the Asian Art Museum to find porcine imagery since we have just entered the Year of the Pig, or the Boar, or whatever you prefer to call it. Strangely enough, though there was dragon, monkey, elephant, and other animal imagery galore throughout the museum, the only pigs I could find were the tiny jade figurine one puts into the hands of the dead (above), and a Japanese netsuke of a tiny boar with a monkey on its back (below).



In any case, here's a Happy New Year to those lackeys of the Chinese Communist Government, Rita Hao at SFist and M.C- at The Standing Room.



And here's a ceramic Chinese Buddha from the 16th century for Miss Heidi and everybody else.

A Political Tapestry

On Thursday the 15th at San Francisco's City Hall...



...there was a "Public Safety Commission" hearing led by Supervisors Mirkarimi, Maxwell, and Dufty that was dealing with crime-fighting issues, which was a bit of a bad joke.



There were a number of Police Department spokesmen speaking in bureaucratese about why nobody seems to get arrested in San Francisco unless you attack Elie Weisel in a downtown hotel and leave all your identification behind so the police can actually track you down.



The Civic Center building I live in has been the target of a number of thieves recently who have stolen bikes from the basement and personal effects from tenants' apartments. When the police have been called, they show up anywhere from 10 to 12 hours after the phone call, and when told that there is a video camera in the lobby that might help in identifying the perpetrators, the police have said to the manager, and I quote, "We're not interested in seeing it. Why don't you go back to your apartment?"



There is something so rotten at the top of San Francisco's Police Department that the entire city is starting to smell it.



H. Brown, in a smart, funny column at the "Fog City Journal," (click here) despairs of anything changing unless we get rid of Newsom, Harris, Fong and a few others in one fell swoop.



h. was also hosting his weekly "Burrito Salon" on Friday the 16th, where a number of local political celebrities were mixing it up...



...including Angela Alioto...



...and City Attorney public spokesman Matt Dorsey, who in person was friendly and charming. He could give Gavin's spokesman, Peter Ragone, a few lessons in people management.



Dorsey brought Brown a hostess gift, which was a bottle of wine called "Rabid Red," which couldn't have been any more appropriate.



Later that evening, the monthly art show in Supervisor Mirkarimi's office in City Hall took place...



...with tapestries by Martin Grizzell, above right.



Supervisor Mirkarimi was absent, since he had joined Mayor Newsom for a whirlwind weekend trip to Japan to visit "sister city" Osaka...



...but his aide Boris did a fine job of playing host, as did the amiable artist himself. Now, if Mirkarimi could just reform the terribly managed San Francisco Police Department...

Lou Harrison's "Young Caesar"

The world premiere of a homoerotic, Asian-infused opera about the teenaged Julius Caesar by the recently deceased California composer Lou Harrison took place on Friday evening at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and it was quite a show.



The piece has a long and troubled history, starting with its original incarnation as a puppet play for five singers and a narrator in 1971, its revision for a male chorus and Western orchestra for the Portland Gay Men's Chorus in the late 1980s, and this final version that Harrison was fiddling with up to his death, which is a conglomeration of the two earlier incarnations along with additional arias written for the main characters.



There was an attempt at a fancy world premiere production at Lincoln Center about six years ago with the choreographer Mark Morris and conductor Dennis Russell Davies involved, but the project collapsed for reasons that nobody is explicating publicly.



The opera was finally midwifed by a brilliant conductor, Nicole Palement, who works out of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and UC Santa Cruz. She led a young, dazzling, exceptionally good-looking orchestra called the "Ensemble Parallele" in the pit (click here for their website). Among many riches, they were the highlight of the evening.



The piece really is like no other, being some weird mix of Cantonese opera, Indonesian gamelan, Western operatic crooning, and just plain Lou Harrison who is a great composer.



The production was anchored by the Narrator, played by one of the Bay Area's greatest musical and theatrical treasures, the character tenor John Duykers, who created the role of Chairman Mao in Adams' "Nixon in China," among other innumerable accomplishments. His role was part speaking, part sprechstimme, and part outright arioso and he was perfection in all of them.




The main role of Young Caesar was played by a Mexican student tenor, Eleazar Rodriguez, whose beautiful voice was a pleasure all evening, though he was more convincing as a tentative teenager than as an incipient general. The 20-member male chorus was also wonderful as they were asked to sing some very complex polyphony all the while performing as stagehands, supernumeraries, and dancers. Their efforts were marred only by their ridiculous costumes and whiteface makeup which made them look not so much "Eastern" as like robot extras from Woody Allen's "Sleeper."



This brings us to the major problem with the opera, which is that the libretto by local San Francisco playwright Robert Gordon is just plain terrible, which is probably why the Lincoln Center production collapsed.



Gordon (above) may be a good playwright for all I know, but the leaden, flat-flooted libretto he has fashioned for "Young Caesar" doesn't have a decent poetic moment in the entire thing, which made for some unintentionally funny moments.



The other major miscue of the evening was the sabotage of baritone Eugene Brancoveanu's performance as Caesar's older lover, King Nicomedes, by the wig designer and the costume designer who I won't name. That's Eugene above in his second outfit, which is butch compared to the diaphanous pink creation in which he enters at the beginning of Act Two. As Steven Matchett next to me pointed out, "He looks like Mae West trying to dress up as Wonder Woman."



The first act was nicely staged with lots of moving screens by a UC Santa Cruz director and singer named Brian Staufenbiel. The opera meanders amiably all over the place, introducing Caesar's political aunt Julia, who gets rid of one wealthy proposed wife and sets him up with the rich, pretty and well-connected Cornelia with whom Caesar has a child.



Act Two is set entirely in Bithynia (Turkey) where Caesar meets and falls in love with King Nicomedes, who for some reason looks like a drag queen from outer space. When the fine choreographer Lawrence Pech danced a near-naked pas de deux with the equally attractive Peter Brandenhoff, while the butch-but-in-drag Brancoveanu sang to his sweet little Mexican tenor dressed in a sheer white teddy, I think it may have been one of the faggiest moments, if you'll pardon the expression, I've seen onstage in my life. (The scene is supposed to be sexy, people, not ludicrous.) In any case, I can't wait for the recording.

Ralph Nader, Celebrity Weiner

Ralph Nader was scheduled to lead a contingent of concerned citizens on a lobbying trip to Nancy Pelosi's Office at the San Francisco Federal Building at 11AM Thursday.



I arrived a bit late after the crowd had moved into the Federal building to journey to Pelosi's 14th floor office, leaving behind a large, grotesque Gandhi statue along with Krissy Keefer, the Green candidate who ran against Pelosi last fall.



It turned out that Nader had arrived at the gathering late and was scheduled to speak for a paying audience at the Commonwealth Club at noon, so he didn't bother joining the group that went to Pelosi's office and simply made a brief appearance in front of the building.



I saw Nader speak in Santa Barbara about 35 years ago, and though he was smart and inspiring, he was also an obviously self-involved megalomaniac.



Nader was not the only reason that the odious Bush and Cheney administration was installed six years ago, but he was one of the reasons, and he has never apologized nor even acknowledged that his hubris has helped to make the world an uglier and ever more dangerous place. He also threatened today, on a San Francisco radio show, to run for president again if Hilary Clinton is the Democratic candidate in 2008. I have one request for Mr. Nader, and that's to get the fuck out of public life because you have nothing left to offer except for your weinie celebrity.



There was also a media swarm in front of the building, but it had nothing to do with Nader. They were there for the arraignment of the BALCO lawyer who was the "confidential source" for two San Francisco Chronicle reporters who copied his confidential grand jury transcripts. Everybody involved in the story, including the reporters, have come out of the story looking like utter scum.



It was a tonic to see the Quaker Peace Vigil organizer, Markley Morris, come out of the Federal Building where he'd just been at a hearing for those arrested during the "die-in" recently. "They've decided to play hardball this time, with no community service, and possible penalties of up to a $1,500 fine and a year in jail." Unlike Nader, these people put their lives and their livings at risk to help stop the insanity of war.

Previews of Coming Attractions

Ten days from now, on Saturday, February 24th, a musical marathon of three consecutive concerts benefiting the Other Minds Music Festival will take place at the Swedenborgian Church, which is an Arts and Crafts jewel box in Presidio Heights. (Click here for their site.)



The event is called a "New Music Seance," with the pianist Sarah Cahill doing most of the heavy lifting over the course of eight to ten hours, playing "hypnotic" music of the 20th century. (Click here for the entire program and ticket info.) This is the second "seance" after the inaugural edition's sold-out success a year and a half ago. I wrote about it at the time here and here and here.



Because it's a benefit, they are getting free labor from everyone, and are trying to get people to buy $50 tickets for each concert. But if you don't have much money, they are selling the same tickets for $20. It's more than worth it, if only for the spirits that hang about the concerts.

Palm Desert Street Fair

In the upscale desert town of Palm Desert, there is a "Street Fair" every weekend held in the parking lot of the College of the Desert that is simply huge.



You can buy just about anything from the many booths, including hippy-dippy batik images along with the Mexican flag, which is not a bad summary of the Coachella Valley, really.



Thousands of people ambled around the warren of booths...



...looking for everything from "Screaming Farm Animals" to Hebrew National Hot Dogs.



There was lots of bad art among the merchandise, including austere black-and-white photoscapes in which nobody seemed to be interested that were being sold by the grumpy young man above.



Most of the vendors seemed to be having a wonderful time, such as the kid in the sunglasses booth above.



One of the sweetest scenes was an elderly gentleman polishing the shoes of an elderly woman with his Amazing Shoe Cleaner.



People watching was high on the menu for everyone...



...especially with odd characters like the billy goat old man above wandering around.



Our driving hosts for the morning were Lesley, the Tour de Palm Springs lady, who insisted on bargaining for luggage at her favorite booth "run by An Arab"...



...while her husband Warren, the Canadian brake and muffler tycoon, was dragged along.



I only wish San Francisco hosted an event half as charming.

The Tour de Palm Springs 1

The "Tour de Palm Springs" is a goodnatured annual charity event where anyone can ride with fellow cycling enthusiasts around the Coachella Valley in either 100-mile, 55-mile, 25-mile, 10-mile or 5-mile routes.



Lesley Swanson, above, had just bought a new bicycle and though we had barely met the evening before, we somehow agreed to reconnoiter on Saturday morning and see about crashing the public cycling party.



The serious 100-mile people had left at an ungodly hour of the morning, while the 5 and 10 mile riders were partitioned out the starting gate at around 9:30 in the morning from the corner of Palm Canyon and Ramon.



For our entertainment pleasure, the Palm Springs High School Band serenaded the cyclists while a group of cheerleaders urged the crowd on to great athletic feats.



Not being official riders anyway, Lesley and I sneaked through a Washington Mutual parking lot and joined the 10-mile group a block away from the starting line. They mostly consisted of families having a great time.



There were pit stops along the way that not only provided water, bathrooms, and food...



...but there were good live bands at each location.



At one watering station in the parking lot of a Del Taco franchise...



...water and M&M's were being distributed by an archetypal Palm Springs Volunteer, above.



Again, there was a great little rock band...



...that was being fronted by a little boy and a large palm frond...



...which he used as a prop while dancing around doing major air guitar.

The Tour de Palm Springs 2

At the end of the race, there was a block-long festival of sorts on Palm Canyon Drive.



Since we had huffed and puffed our way around Palm Springs all morning, Lesley helped herself to two official "Tour de Palm Springs" T-shirts to commemorate the event and gave one to me.



The fair was fun, with all the cyclists and their bright plumage...



...standing around exuding endorphin highs.



There was a family bicycle-built-for-four...



...siblings arm wrestling...



...and cyclists wearing "in memoriam" T-shirts for a Marine relative killed in Iraq.



There were booths lining the street, including a weird Christian one...



...that featured multiple choices.




Finally, there was another good rock band that was playing as background for a couple of young daredevils doing stunts on a ramp.



They were not only performing backflips but looked as if they might keep sailing all the way over the palms.

Poolside Hiatus

Having heard one detail too many about Gavin Newsom's sordid behavior lately, not to mention having a huge paying job with a Sunday deadline, it seemed a good time to head for Palm Springs.



If the job is finished on time, expect a few desert pictures to perk up your rain-soaked lives this week. If not, posting will be intermittent.

Bamboo, Sitar and Tabla

Admission to San Francisco's Asian Art Museum is free on the first Tuesday of each month for the unwashed masses courtesy of a sponsorship by Target.



Two new exhibits opened last week on the ground floor, including a rather dull survey with an impressive name: "Princes, Palaces, and Passion: The Art of India’s Mewar Kingdom."



In conjunection with the exhibit, there was a performance by the Rajasthani Storytellers from India scheduled, but the U.S. State Department decided they were not worthy to travel to our shores and their visas didn't arrive in time.



Their replacement was a young local tabla player named Salar Nader (click here for his website).



He accompanied a fabulous sitar player who was introduced to the crowd, but whose name wasn't on any of the signage or the Asian Art Museum website.



Suffice it to say that their music-making was delightful as it echoed throughout the entire museum from 1 to 2PM...



...and even kept a crowd of Montessori schoolchildren from getting too restless.



The other new exhibit is called "Masters of Bamboo: Japanese Baskets and Sculpture from the Cotsen Collection," which is an astonishing assemblage.



It just confirms that in design the Japanese have few peers in the world.

Mayoral Meltdown

The jackals of the commercial press can smell a wounded politician, and they have been hovering around Gavin Newsom with a ferocity that they have never previously exhibited around the charismatic San Francisco mayor.



Newsom, who is used to a mostly adoring and compliant press, has not taken this reversal well according to accounts from today's latest photo-op, which was held to praise the horrible local energy monopoly, PG&E, for doing some kind of partnership with the real estate scam that is the Academy of Art University.



None of the press were interested in "the issues," however, and just wanted to talk to Newsom about his publicly announced alcoholism, his sorta rehab with an old friend who runs the Delancey Foundation, and his adultery with his campaign manager's wife. For some reason, this made Mayor Newsom feel bitter and unloved.



The best and most sympathetic take on this whole subject that I've read is on my friend Willie's blog (click here for the entire thing) where he writes:

“Gavin Newsom is facing a tough, life-defining decision. He has reached a true fork in the road.

To make things simple the two tines of the fork are marked with signposts. One path is ‘Politics,’ the other path is ‘Alcohol.’ Gavin has to choose one or the other.

And the poor guy is making the wrong choice again—he’s choosing Politics!

...

Alcohol takes years to destroy a person. Politics can eat you up in no time.

The real choice is both or neither. He’s choosing both. He has entered the rehab-relapse ping-pong game, with his soul as the ball.

It’s not good for him. It’s not good for San Francisco. It’s just sad."

The other great chronicler of this disaster is Beth Spotswood who is Standing By Her Man with a Bloody Mary in her hand (click here). As she puts it:

"The blueprint is clear; when in scandal, go to rehab. Everyone does it. Gavin is hardly original. I hope to one day be famous enough to do it myself."

Shostakovich and Stravinsky at The Ballet

When writing about the San Francisco Ballet's opening night Gala (click here), I noted that standing room tickets had jumped from $8 to $18 this season, which seemed a trifle steep, and asked the company publicly on this blog and privately in conversation to rethink the policy.



The message somehow made it to the proper authorities in the company, and I can announce with pride and happiness that standing room tickets have gone back to a very reasonable $10 for the season. Hurrah.



On Saturday evening the 3rd, the Ballet was performing three one-act ballets as "Mixed Program #2," and I was drawn by the music being played, which included two early 20th-century Russian musical masterpieces, Shostakovich's jazzy and wild First Piano Concerto and Stravinsky's "Firebird."



The first piece on the program, "Blue Rose," was choreographed by the company's Artistic Director, Helgi Tomasson to some modern "Russian rag" music. Since I have found Tomasson's choreography over the years to be extraordinarily dull, I wisely missed the first number and arrived just before it finished, where I ran into Kyle (above) who confirmed that "Blue Rose" was indeed an exercise in ennui and that my instincts had been correct.



Nobody looked too excited at the first intermission, either, but things perked up significantly with the second ballet, "The Dance House," choroegraphed for the company in 1995 by David Bintley to the Shostakovich Piano Concert.



The music was as delightful as ever, the dancing exquisite, and the choreography rather weird in that its programmatic tale didn't fit the concerto very well. At first, I thought the piece was supposed to be about Stalinist oppression or something similar, but upon reading the program later, found that it was supposed to be an AIDS Ballet with the menacing character who appears throughout representing Patient Zero. Oh, puhleeze.



The highlight of the ballet was the dancing in the slow movement of new Principal Dancer Molly Smolen, who performed with her Estonian husband, Tiit Helimets. It's difficult to say what makes Smolen so different from the other dancers and so compulsively watchable, but for whatever reason, there's something very special about this lady.



The "Firebird" was in a new staging by company choreographer Yuri Possokhov, and though it was colorful and amusing, it was also very silly. Actually, the same could be said of just about every "Firebird" staging I've seen over the decades in spite of the great, well-known score, but this version still ranked among the silliest. But who cares? Standing room was only $10 and the evening was worth every penny.

Sailing to Armageddon

While most of San Francisco and the rest of the nation were watching the train wreck last Thursday that is the Mayor Gavin Newsom administration...



...there were other people focusing on slightly more pressing issues...



...such as how to stop the slaughter in Iraq and the coming lunatic invasion of Iran.



According to the "Jerusalem Post," under an article (click here for the whole thing) that was posted below the satellite image of the Suez Canal above, the following is currently taking place:

"A US Navy strike group led by the assault ship USS Bataan steamed through the Suez Canal on Tuesday [January 30th] on its way to join the buildup of American forces in the Middle East. The Bataan, which entered Egyptian waters Monday, spent the night at the Mediterranean harbor of Port Said and was expected to leave the Egyptian part of the Red Sea later Tuesday, a Suez Canal official said, speaking on condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to speak to the press.

The seven-vessel Bataan group includes 2,200 US Marines and sailors, helicopters and Harrier fighter jets, the Navy said in Bahrain. The US Fifth Fleet, which is based in Bahrain, will be overseeing around 50 warships in the Mideast after the arrival of the Bataan and an American aircraft carrier group in February, said US Navy Lt. Cmdr. Charlie Brown. The Fifth Fleet normally commands a fleet of about 45 ships, about a third of them from US-allied navies, Brown said.

The Navy is in the midst of a regional buildup, with the group of the aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis on its way as well as 21,500 US soldiers being sent to Iraq. The carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower is already in the region.

The United States has not had two carriers in the Mideast since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003."

Markley Morris and Steve The Quaker stood stolidly at the Federal Building on Golden Gate Avenue as interminable speakers thundered against the United States' pre-emptive wars.



When are these speakers ever going to learn that preaching to the converted just turns everyone off?



Meanwhile, the United States Senate debates a "non-binding" resolution against the Iraq War that is virtually meaningless to the monomaniacal villains currently running the country.



A monthly die-in finally ensued after the speeches, and the world turns round, waiting for the other shoe to drop, while the American public is told nothing.

Smash-Up: The Story of a Mayor

San Francisco City Hall is suddenly feeling like a 1947 Susan Hayward film (click here).



Alex Tourk, Mayor Gavin Newsom's right-hand man and the winning campaign manager for Newsom's mayoral campaign four years ago, resigned from his job in the Mayor's Office yesterday. He did so after confronting the Mayor with evidence that Newsom had an affair with Tourk's wife, one Ruby Rippey-Tourk.



She also happened to be Newsom's "appointments secretary" at the time of the affair, which opens up a whole other workplace sexual harassment can of worms. There are rumors of an abortion involved, along with the fact that Ms. Rippey-Tourk has been in rehab for undisclosed addiction problems, and her confession to her husband was part of her 12 Step Program.



A press confreence was called for this morning at 11:30 AM and instead of it being in the rotunda or outside on Polk Street or even on the balcony in front of the mayor's office, it took place in the anteroom to Room 200 itself, which is meant for about 30 people. So, about 100 reporters and photographers crammed into the tiny room.



As usual, Mayor Newsom was ten minutes late, and he gave an abashed, two-minute speech saying he was very sorry for his behavior, and that all the reports were true, and that he hoped to regain the trust and confidence of San Francisco.



Somebody tried to ask a question at the end of this statement, but only got about five words into it before the Mayor exited.



The media swarm was amazing to watch, including Eve Batey (above) from SFGate...



...along with trashy bloggers like myself...



...rubbing elbows with local TV news personalities trying desperately to come up with a spin.



Dan Noyes (above), the local ABC-TV anchor, who has been treated horrendously by the Newsom administration for simply asking a few hard-hitting questions over the last year, was looking rather stunned by the developments. (Click here to get to his fine blog.)



He was joined by Steve Jones (above) of the weekly "Bay Guardian."



Newsom staffers such as Wade Crowfoot (above) were scattering quickly throughout City Hall to get away from any reporters, and who could blame them?



The hallway in front of the Board of Supervisors offices was eerily quiet as if everyone was waiting for a bomb to go off.



According to a staffer in Supervisor Daly's office, everyone at City Hall has known about the affair and its messy aftermath for the last year. Everyone, that is, except for the poor husband, Alex Tourck.




"This is just the beginning. There are a lot worse things involved that haven't been disclosed in public yet. You'll see." What is poor Pat Murphy (above) and the "San Francisco Chronicle" going to do when they can no longer just print out Mayor's Office Press Releases as news?